On May 18, 2012 leaders of the G8 and three African countries jointly launched the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition (NA). The collaboration was announced by the US president at the time, Barack Obama, who declared that “…food security is a moral imperative, but it’s also an economic imperative. History teaches us that one of the most effective ways to pull people and entire nations out of poverty is to invest in their agriculture” (Obama, 2012). NA aims to do just that: enhance Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in African agriculture by a partnership model committing public and private actors to shared goals of “sustained, inclusive, agriculture-led growth” (New Alliance, n.d.A).
However, this aim – and with it NA as such – has received severe media criticism for being but a thin foil for what the The Guardian has dubbed the ‘corporate scramble for Africa’ (Jones, 2014): “It will be like colonialism. Farmers will not be able to farm until they import, linking farmers to [the] vulnerability of international prices. Big companies will benefit” a Tanzanian politician told the newspaper (Kabwe, quoted in Provost, Ford & Tran, 2014). More recently, the European Parliament (EP) has issued a resolution raising similar concerns, albeit in different tones. Thus, the EP (2016) in its review of NA:
Calls on governments and donors to suspend or review all policies, projects and consultancy arrangements that directly encourage and facilitate land grabbing by supporting highly harmful projects and investments or indirectly increase pressure on land and natural resources and can result in serious human rights violations.